"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato

Thursday, February 19, 2015

ISIS too Evil for Civilized Minds to Process

I didn’t watch that video of Islamic State butchers
beheading twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians on Libya’s Mediterranean coast.
The still photos of the terrorists leading the Christians to their doom told me
all I wanted to know.

I just finished a book on the Nazi’s death camp Auschwitz authored
by Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew who served as Dr. Josef Mengele’s
pathologist for nine months in 1944. The book presents a jarring narrative of Mengele’s
cruelty, Nazi psychopathy and the appalling industrialization of murder from
the viewpoint of a man who spent most of a year staring into the Auschwitz maw.

Nyiszli served with Auschwitz’s 12th
Sonderkommando. The Sonderkommando was a group of about 800 inmates who helped
shepherd the Jews into the gas chambers and then stacked the dead bodies into
the crematoriums. In exchange for this grizzly work, the Sonderkommando were
well fed, well clothed and provided with comfortable quarters. Each
Sonderkommando served four months and was then executed. Their successors’
first task was to load the previous Sonderkommando’s remains into the
crematoriums for disposal.

Every Sonderkommando knew its fate and could predict the
approximate date of its annihilation. And yet all but one marched meekly to
their deaths.

A remarkable part of Nyiszli’s book is the scathing forward,
written by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim savaged the book’s author and the Jewish
submission to the Nazis. Stories of Jews marching obediently to their deaths
remain one of the enduring mysteries of the holocaust.

But as those Coptic Christians demonstrated, such submission
is not unique to Jews. And I’m beginning to think that those Coptics’ acceptance
of their fate serves as a metaphor for the entire civilized world’s submission
to ISIS savagery. We’re not putting up serious opposition and it’s our
government’s official position that we’re not actually at war with these
barbarians.

This last Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder denied that
we were at a war. One of Obama’s first priorities as president was to treat
terrorism as a law enforcement problem. And the nation’s top law enforcement
officer says, “What war?”

On that same day, at a conference on “violent extremism,”
Vice President Joe Biden, who was selected to give Obama “gravitas” in foreign
policy, declared himself an expert on Somalia because he had taken so many
rides from Somali taxi cab drivers.

And to top it all off, the previous evening, during an
interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf
insisted that, to fight terrorism, we need to create jobs in Islamic countries.
No doubt raising the minimum wage would help too.

What all these people need to do is read an exhaustively
researched essay by Graeme Wood in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly titled: “What
ISIS Really Wants.”

Wood interviewed Islamic State recruiters and spokesmen in
western countries, as well as the world’s leading Islamic scholars. Because he
prefers his head on his shoulders, he declined to visit the Islamic State. What
he found was that, for the true believer, the Islamic State is the purest
manifestation of Islam since the 7th century. The allure of the
Islamic State for fundamentalist Muslims is attributable to its strict
adherence to the Koran. Muslims who have been taught all their lives to pray
for the restoration of a caliphate have their first legitimate caliph in a
millennium.

ISIS slave markets, ISIS crucifixion of children, ISIS rape
of women, and ISIS burning and beheading of non-Muslims and Muslims who exhibit
insufficient purity are not just permitted by the Koran, but required by
Mohammed’s teaching.

They don’t want jobs. They want Paradise. Theirs is an
apocalyptic doctrine that has as its ultimate goal, hastening the end of the
world.

And it is the official policy of the Obama administration
that if we could create jobs for them, busting tires, flipping burgers, or
manning phones in call centers, Muslims and Christians could live together in
perfect harmony.

So here we are, marching ourselves into oblivion like the
Jews of Auschwitz with our own government operating the crematoriums. There was
nothing unique about the European Jews submission to Hitler’s domination. Their
civilized minds simply could not intellectually process the Nazis’ depravity.
Similarly, too much of western civilization refuses to admit the reality of the
Islamic State.

And there are even those who seem to think we have it
coming. Our own president ignorantly repeats the Muslim propaganda that the
Crusades justify terrorism.

About Me

I was born in Tombstone, Arizona, but moved to California in 1959 when labor strikes at the copper mines devastated the Arizona economy. I've been moving north ever since. Pullman is as far north as I care to live and I'm looking toward reversing the drift.